Today I asked Claire Saxby to go out with me, and she said 'no'. Worse still, it was karaoke night down the bar.   I feel surprisingly happy about the whole romance situation now, since I no longer have to be tense, alert and 'on the pull' when she's around. Similarly I can now get a taxi home when it rains, rather than getting poetically soaked. Song lyrics are no longer meaningful and significant and have returned to being bad poetry set to music. It is now cold and windy instead of being bracing and invigorating. I'll be fine as long as they don't play 'Tears of a Clown' by Smokey Robinson. It's probably for the best, since with my flu it wouldn't so much be a kiss as a continuation of the battle of the sexes by biological means.   The Japanese have a lot to answer for. There is something fearsomely terrible about a karaoke version of a Spice Girls song. Just when you think music cannot get worse, it does.   It drizzled on the way back. I got non-poetically moist.
			The characters and situations in this diary are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happenings. Any resemblance to such things is coincidental, or just for humourous effect. All names have been chosen to implicate the innocent.